We left in the dust of morning, heading south, until the road angled east back toward Dunhuang, beginning to close a loop. Before long was Yarkand. Our original itinerary had us visiting a pair of mosques there, but unknown events had closed the city to foreigners. Looking up the wide main street from the highway, I saw no barricades, only a quiet town going about its business on a quiet Saturday morning.
Aside from a set of dunes on the city's far side, the rest of the drive to Karglik was along a string of fertile oases. Almond and walnut trees took advantage of the natural irrigation. We detoured through town, passing what appeared to be an entire community laying ground for a new sidewalk. We reached a road junction just beyond, and had we turned right, a two-day drive would have brought us back to Darchen and Mt. Kailash, where we'd been almost a year ago to the day.
We faced our only real checkpoint of the day outside the town of Guma, and with momentum thus broken, we stopped for a simple lunch. Before setting off again, I visited the loo out back, basically a bamboo shack with a short drop into a slow gurgling stream. As I did my business, I noticed movement down and to my right, and was horrified to be looking over an old woman squatting in the stall beside mine. Her eyes were turned up to me, apparently as surprised as I was. It was only then that I remember that many Muslims don't stand up to pee.
Beyond Guma, the desert returned with a vengeance. Overturned and burned trucks were the modern day equivalent of the dead caravan animals from the old tales. Cars blasted along, throwing up dust in their wakes, which swirled like snow. The roads though appeared relatively sand free, the grass grids that lined the roadsides very successfully holding the desert in its place. At Kunyu, a new city was being built almost overnight, with hundreds of apartment buildings being stamped into the earth. I'd been amazed at the numbers I'd seen earlier in the trip, but this was on a scale unbelievable. All the shining white blocks reminded me of Ashgabat. I wondered at where the hundreds of thousands of residents would come from.
The map showed two routes into Khotan, the one from the west through a number of small towns that could only exist as oases, along what would have been the old Silk Road. But our driver chose the other route, mainly by default, after a great conferring with maps and with our new guide. I'd silently debated earlier whether to suggest the western route, but had said nothing, figuring they'd have scouted routes that would best avoid the checkpoints. But I was now sure that they didn't know where they were going. And I stewed, reconnecting with my usual anger at drivers who couldn't even accomplish the only job they had, which is to get us from A to B. And the silent anger found another target in our guide, who in being unprepared, had cheated me out of seeing a segment of the old road.
Instead, we got another hour of empty desert, then a long security stop. LYL and I actually entered the police station this time, as two men and a single women were segregated into cages behind us. In the riverbed beyond, figures could be seen scrounging the stones for the jade that made this town famous. In fact, one of my goals in visiting here was to replace the jade necklace that I'd had for the past 22 years, which had broken on my kitchen floor last autumn. I then returned the shattered stone to a riverbed, tossing it from the Marutamachi bridge into the Kamogawa flowing below.
But a more pressing need was food. The Friday night food market was a short walk from our hotel. Dozens of stalls lined what must have once been an airplane hanger, and in the aisles between, families and young couples walked slowly, enjoying a meal out in the cool of evening.
In hindsight, the food market would prove the highlight to the trip to Khotan. A visit to the Rawak Stupa was a close second, though the feeling of remoteness I'd been seeking in this sole remnant of a 1500 year old Buddhist kingdom was diminished by the boardwalk that now ringed it, and by the grass grids pressing in from all sides, as prevention against again losing the stupa to encroaching sands. Flies buzzed my arms as I strode the planks around the site, a mingling of DNA with all the great explorers who'd visited a century before.
I'd hoped to visit the gravesite of an old Sufi imam, but the site was now off limits and rumored to have been destroyed. A pleasant alternative was a visit to a silk workshop in a village nearby. Grapevines crawled across arched trellises in order to keep out the sun. I'd seen a couple of these over the boulevards of Turpan, but only from my hotel window above. Here we could walk through them, or look down a row to see how it framed a home, a courtyard. At the end of one, a man chopped at a brick wall with an axe.
The modern city itself was overdeveloped, many of the new buildings apparently empty. Looking at the unlit windows of blank facades from the hotel was like looking across the array of empty eyesocket-like caves of the Buddhist grottoes. And like in those canyons, dust hung over everything. The only real color were the children in their uniforms, entering schoolgrounds through gates well-fortified by heavily armed guards. It depressed me to think of the kids growing up like this, and it saddened me more when I thought that this too is what the Republicans envision for American children.
Sunday was market day, and the reason we came. We dawdled away the morning in our hotel, awaiting our new driver who had been recommended by our guide before he returned home to Kashgar the previous night. As we waited, I realized that we knew nothing about him, or the dodging looking friend who accompanied him. As they turned away to load our bags in the car, I took a quick photo of the license plate and the profile of their faces beyond. It turned out to be a moot point, as one of them never left our side. He spoke neither English or Mandarin, but helped us get past the checkpoint into the market.
Where nothing at all was happening. I'd read that this market rivaled the famous one in Kashgar, yet had no tourists. Kashgar, I found on our visit last October, wasn't at all bad. And maybe the reason that no one came to this one is because it sucks. Where Kashgar was charming with its grid of narrow lanes housing a variety of stalls and shops, this one was like a shopping mall in the American Midwest. And one failing economically. Most shops were for those ubiquitous workout uniforms, or clothes for children, or for a menagerie of wedding dresses in a rainbow of ice cream colors. We walked around awhile in disbelief, then settled in at a fast food chicken place, swinging in these weird playground chairs and hoping things would perk up later. Bizarrely, after getting on wifi I wasn't able to find any of those articles I'd read back in Japan about things to see here.
I felt defeated. Never had I failed so miserably at finding anything of interest, and I had to concede that the whole enterprise was a miserable failure. We made a halfhearted attempt at wandering the adjacent streets, which were slightly more interesting, but by then our standards had fallen pretty low. The city museum, supposedly good, was in the process of being moved, and thus closed. So we decided to head to the airport, four hours before our flight out. And I suppose in that lies the bucket list aspect to Khotan, as a place that one never need bother oneself with.
On the turntable: Blur, "The Best of Blur"
On the nighttable: Ernest Hemingway, "Winner take Nothing"
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